Our system is not booting up properly. It keeps going to this screen:

Enter Run Level (0-6, s or S):

I tried to hit all nos# 0-6 is just goes to hung state.
Tried s or S & it brings me to single user mode. I've checked the file systems & found out that all three had 98%. I tried to delete as many files as I could (data only) & managed to get it down to 94%, all 3 of them. When I rebooted the system it went back up to 98% again (all 3). I tried to look for wayward processes that I could kill or trace, could not find anything at all.

I need help very badly as the system is a production one & the only backup's I have are the data only. No full system backups available.

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Thank You.

The UNIX and Linux Forums

See my Out of DiskSpace? article for tips on where to look.

Shame on you for not having system backups. Microlite Edge (http://microlite.com) is inexpensive (yes, I'm a reseller) and HIGHLY recommended for SCO systems.

The critical file system is the root file system. If it is at 100% the system will not boot.
You will have to boot from a diskette, mount the root file system and begin deleting/truncating files until you have 10 megabytes of free space.
Look at these files.

/usr/adm/messages
/usr/adm/syslog
/usr/spool/lp/logs/requests
/etc/wtmp

And these directories.

/usr/spool/mail
/tmp
/usr/spool/lp/temp

After you have got the system to boot.

As root do:
#cd /
#du -a |sort -r -n >/tmp/du.srt

Then examine /tmp/du.srt, as it will contain a list of all files/directories in descending order by size.
This will allow you to find very large files, and also directories that contain a large number of very small files.

---------- Post updated at 03:16 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:02 PM ----------

Anticipating your next post, that you don't have an emergency boot diskette.
Go out this afternoon and buy a new hard drive. Temporarily remove the old drive, and re-install the operating system on the new drive.
If the original drive is SCSI, change the ID and set the read only jumper, (if IDE set the old drive as slave, or attach to the secondary IDE channel), install the drive and go through mkdev hd, being sure not to mark any of the existing file systems as new.
Copy the required files from the old drive to the new one.

You can use Norton Ghost to duplicate the original drive, although you cannot change any partition sizes.

Have a nice weekend.

I am doing a ghost image on the device while waiting for some replies to this post as I have no emergency boot diskette to use. Right now I hear a ticking sound on the source drive......looks like it is about to fail, although ghosting it seems o be going through....hopefully.

With regards to the suggested directories to check on, I did have a look at those & deleted files that are not needed.

Thanks for the tips. Will try to do the part after reboot....that is after I have successfully created an image for it.

If you manage to get the old disk to boot, you could download Microlite Edge, see Tony's post for where from, install it, create the recovery diskettes, do a full backup, replace the disk with a new larger hard drive, boot from the recovery diskettes, and in the process of doing the restore create new larger partitions.
This will save re-configuring all the users, printers, network settings, application software etc.
You can run Microlite Edge for at least 30 days as a fully functional eval.

Sorry for not having any backups Tony. I just joined the company on the 5th & inherited a legacy system that no one seemed to care about, backups included. Now they are giving it a priority since it failed & most applications are mapped to the unix system I am trying to recover. Will try the evaluation software as well. Hopefully this will all be fixed.